Why Did Hospital Ethics Committees Emerge in the US?

Ethics committees are the primary mechanism for dealing with ethical issues in hospitals in the United States today [1-3]. Present in nearly every US hospital, ethics committees were virtually nonexistent in the 1960s and ’70s and, as recently as the early 1980s, were present in only 1 percent of US hospitals [4]. By the late 1980s, however, ethics committee presence had expanded to over 60 percent of US hospitals [5]—a figure that jumped to over 90 percent by the late 1990s [6], when ethics consultation services (a standard function of ethics committees) were present in all US hospitals with 400 beds or more, federal hospitals, and hospitals that are members of the Council of Teaching Hospitals [2].